rSlash - r/Maliciouscompliance Big Boss Messes with IT Guy & Gets Himself Fired!

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

r/Maliciouscompliance In today's episode OP works for a company that provides online sales services for another business. That other business hires on a big boss is going to take over the online sales technology. The big boss immediately gets into a huge dispute with OP's company. So when the big boss demands that OP's company hands over the code without making any changes, they happily comply! The code transfer was a massive train wreck, which resulted in the big boss getting canned. Oops! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our slash malicious compliance, where a stupid manager tries to mess with the IT team. Our next Reddit post is from writer Z.A. Background. I worked as a developer for a company that built and managed a software behind a rapidly growing online e-commerce store that sells tech gadgets and accessories. I'll refer to this company as Megastore. It was situated in a central African country. The Megastore started off small and my boss built the original website on risk for a cut of the commission that Megastore earned.

Side note, because this is important later, the commission that Megastore gained from the sale of an item on the site would be split on purchase. The majority of the commission would be paid directly into Megastore's bank account, and a smaller portion would be paid into my boss's bank account. As the popularity of Megastore grew, so did the demands on my boss, and he was able to build a company around servicing Megastore. While he did try to grow his client base, none were the same size or scope as Megastore, and thus weren't able to carry the company. Megastore was approached for a buyout by another company. We'll call them bad company. Part of the buyout deal included ending the revenue sharing arrangement

with my boss. At the beginning of the process, everything was positive because my boss arranged a big payday and the deal was signed. He had managed to get this deal because this buyout would kill his company and thus, he and all his staff needed to be compensated. The buyout took several months, and by the end, the relationship between bad company and my boss had completely broken down. My boss had managed to secure another large client, and thus didn't need to close this company, because of this, bad companies said that they didn't need to pay my boss a big payout. A lot of these meetings were above my pay grade.

The setup. So we were in the final days of handing over the entire site to Bad Company. The chief technical officer for Bad Company had a complete hatred for the code that ran Megastore because it was a bastardized version of an open source platform. He considered himself a purest, and if the code wasn't custom-built for the purpose, it wasn't worth anything. So, back to my boss. He had managed to keep some version of the original deal in place. But, in the preceding weeks, he made a big threat to Bad Company that he would do something funny with the code that handled the commission split. It was very much just him blowing off steam, because he couldn't legally do it, nor was it actually in his nature to do it. It was all talk, no bite. However, this outburst did create a situation where

the CTO didn't trust us to remove our code that handled the commission in our favor. So, in the final build that we were required to hand over, we were meant to remove all code that handled the commission, and then the CTO would implement new code to handle the commission and then deploy it to the live side instead of us. The official documentation was rewarded from the supply and deploy handover version to just a supply handover version. Great! Let's work for us! D-Day! So D-Day arrived and we had actually completed the build a few days earlier with commission sharing code completely removed and we were just sitting on this new version so we could hand it over on the day as contractually required to do so. So we handed it over in the morning and we were all planning on hitting up for

a long lunch. Just before we left, we checked Megastore for the last time and noticed that the CTO had already deployed the handed over version. We were puzzled because we assumed that any development to the commission code would require extensive testing. We were puzzled because we assumed that any development to the commission code would require extensive testing. We logged into the site and saw that no code for handing the commission in any fashion was there. There was nothing. We logged into the payment gateway and there were no logs there either. This meant that no commission was being deducted at all, so Megastore was losing 100% of their revenue. We immediately reached out to the CTO via multiple calls, which he rejected until he eventually

answered. Then he yelled that he was busy and that we should stop calling him, followed by him hanging up the phone. So my boss, concerned that this somehow would be thrown back in his face as the thing that he threatened that he would do, he instructed us to do a hot fix and to deploy it to the server without the CTO's approval, which we did. It was a messy fix using old code and we put all the money into the megastore account and only one sent into my boss's account because something had to be deducted for the code to even work. 10 minutes after deploying the hot fix, the CTO called,

accusing my boss of stealing. Many heated words were shared, followed by my boss putting the CTO on speaker and instructing all of us to record the conversation on our phones. The CTO informed us that he had already implemented the code as he had noticed the completed build two days earlier. We tried to tell him that something was wrong and he just replied that we were too simple minute to understand custom code because we were just simple web admins, nothing more, and that we had 30 minutes to remove the hot fix code. My boss got him to repeat the instructions one more time and state that we had supplied

a build that satisfied the conditions of the agreement and then hung up on them as soon as he uttered those words. It took five minutes to revert the code. We were then instructed to all go to the lunch venue and leave our phones in our cars. The aftermath. Because D-Day wasn't into the month kind of deal, it happened to land on our Friday. So the loss of income was only reflected in the bank on the Monday or Tuesday of the following week. This meant the problem was only picked up after running commission free for 3-4 days.

My boss is aware of the amount of money lost, but we are not. However, we assume that it costs that company the commission on between 1000-4000 individual sales. The CTO did supposedly try to spin a story that our boss had tried to do something funny, and all my boss did was provide the recordings of the conversation which shut that down fast. My boss got his payout, all the staff got a great bonus, and we noticed that the CTO's LinkedIn status changed a few weeks later to seeking broader challenges.

Our next reddit post is from Mike Mojak. I oversee a team of a dozen folks when it's fully staffed. We had one guy move out of state for school, a lady retired to care for her grandkids when our daughter got sick, then three people promote up within the organization all within four weeks time. So almost half the team suddenly became unavailable. While I'm involved in the recruiting and onboarding process, management up to three levels above me tends to be the bottleneck.

Each time someone let me know they were moving on, I informed management and gave them a running total. We're currently at 84% staffing. We're at 66% staffing, etc. We placed ads and me and my team lead conducted first round interviews. Second level interviews were recommended to the next level of management, and that's where the process suddenly stopped. For a week, then two, then three. It commonly takes two to three weeks after hire to bring a new person up to speed to start being productive, and perhaps eight weeks for a new person to reach 90, 95% of medium productivity goals.

The existing team was ready to pull together and work harder to keep up with the work, but I took each one of my workers aside and coached them that the heavy workload they were under was not their problem to solve. Yes, customers were complaining. Yes, other groups in the organization were getting frustrated that our team wasn't getting things done in a timely fashion. I encouraged them to work efficiently and well, but to not put an extra unpaid time or contribute their own resources to projects. And if anyone was insistent in their complaints regarding the team's productivity, send them to me, and I would explain the situation. Middle and upper management across the organization started complaining about how little work we were getting done.

Then I played the Uno reverse card. Hey, all we need is adequate well-trained staff and we'll be able to keep up. However, managers 1, 2, and 3 have all had potential interviews on their desk for almost a month now. After that, I started getting the stink guy from these folks. I found out later that one or two of the people that I report to had proposed the idea that my team could run just as well a little bit leaner. So they arranged to find out. Whoopsie daisy! Our metrics indicated that the organization's goals weren't met because of their decision.

But I was able to provide the stats that my team's goals were met, and that in many respects, per person efficiencies were improved. My team members got their bonus, but middle management failed to achieve, so no bonus for them this year. Wow OP, major props to you. I'm pretty confident that they were expecting you to start cracking the whip and overworking your employees so that they would basically double their workload or work longer hours so that they could get all the work done. But you said, nah, I don't think so. And as a result,

they missed their fat bonus. Our next reddit post is from Halnicki. So my mother-in-law was pulling into a parking space at a big blue store, and the person parked in this space in front of her was starting to back out of the spot and left her car there. So my mother-in-law went to grab the car and just used that for her shopping. The woman had left her wallet in the seat of the car, though, so my mother-in-law flagged her down and got her attention. The woman immediately started going off on my mother-in-law, telling her to mind your own business and that the car was fine where it was.

So my mother-in-law, telling her to mind your own business and that the cart was fine where it was. So my mother-in-law decided to take her advice. She told the woman, fine, I'll mind my business, your wallet will be at customer service, and then walked away. By the time the woman registered what she'd said, parked again, and went to the store, my mother-in-law had already dropped the wallet off at customer service. Where there was a long line, and she warned them that she was pretty nasty. Apparently, when the woman went to get her wallet, she started to make threats and was threatening to call the cops if anything was missing. The manager told her that she wouldn't be doing that, and that it was her own fault

that she left the wallet in the cart. So I think if I were in your mother-in-law shoes, OP, I probably wouldn't like take money from the wallet because I don't want to be a thief. It's kind of just not the person I want to be, but there's no way I would turn that wall into customer service. I'd probably just dump it in the nearest trash can. Our next reddit post is from Jake No Mistake. I used to work in a midsize company in the engineering department.

One of the managers started to get upset because if he walked around at exactly 830, our start time, everyone wasn't in their seats. He felt that the engineers were being too lax with their time. The edict went out that all engineers had to be in their seats exactly at start time. I told my boss that I was not planning on complying because I was a salary professional and I expected to be treated as such. And that if they didn't trust me to put in an honest week's work, then they should fire me instead of micromanage me. The older and much wiser engineers took a different approach. They all

showed up five minutes early to make sure they were in their seats at 830, but they also set an alarm for 5pm and would literally drop everything they were doing exactly at 5pm and leave the building. Is the manager having a meeting that was supposed to end at 5 but is running a little late? Nope, at 5pm a series of alarms would go off and everyone would stand up in the middle of the meeting to leave. Does operations need technical support at 455? They have exactly

five minutes on the phone with the engineer before he'll have to get off the phone. Is someone trying to discuss a work-related issue at 828? Better wait a couple of minutes because no one in the engineering department is answering work-related questions for another two minutes. Needless to say, the policy didn't last very long. So engineers are professional problem solvers. So it's generally a good idea to never make yourself a problem for an engineer. Our next wedded post is from Sugarman. Not me, this happened to my sister-in-law. She's quite a bit younger than me, and she was working part time in a chain shoe shop while studying. After graduating with a business degree, she was offered a job managing one of the shoe stores.

This obviously seemed like a fantastic opportunity for her first role as a graduate. She was on probation for three months, and after that her salary would increase, although her probation could be extended. She hated it. The owner would give her instructions, and later that day, the owner's girlfriend would come in and give her opposite instructions. Then, the girlfriend would criticize my sister for the way that she worked, and micromanage her until the sister did it the girlfriend's way. The girlfriend wasn't part of the business at all, but my sister-in-law didn't want

to cause any issues, so she didn't argue. However, it was causing her a lot of stress. I noticed she lost quite a bit of weight. It kind of came to a head after my sister-in-law had spent a few hours sorting the filing out, then went to the shop to serve customers. When she went back to finish the filing, the girlfriend had gone through and messed it all up, saying that she'd organized it differently for her. This wasted hours of my sister-in-law's time causing her more work. My sister-in-law suspected they were going to extend her probation to screw her over, even though she was doing a great job despite being sabotage and micromanaged. Her staff loved her and sales were higher, so she started looking for another job. Surprise, they extended her probation, but she found

a job paying more and only 10 minutes from her flat. They wanted her to work ASAP, but she was sure she had to work her notice period, which was 6 weeks. She asked me to read her contract to see if I could confirm. The notice was indeed 6 weeks, except for staff on probation. Either party could terminate with only 1 week's notice. My sister-in-law

told the owner that she was quitting and gave one week notice. The owner was caught with his pants down and couldn't find another manager that quickly. The boss told my sister-in-law that her notice period was six weeks, to which she took great delight in pointing out that her probation had been extended and so the required notice was only one week. My sister-in-law has been at her new job for quite a while and is much happier. Our next reddit post is from LuckJ. Today's story comes from the world of education

where teachers are burnt out, overworked, and underpaid. Due to an influx in federal funding due to COVID stimulus money, our district decided to put that money to good use. Did they give teachers much needed raises, higher more aides, update our 60-year-old building? No, even better! They hired several educational consultants to coach us on how to do our jobs. This alone was very insulting to most teachers. Many of whom had been a longer than some of the consultants had been alive.

Thankfully, many of the new consultants didn't really impact our day-to-day work, but there was one who was particularly difficult. Karen continually adds to our workload, insults teachers with snide remarks and talks down to the staff. At one point, it got so unbearable that the most experienced teacher and art department simply got up from a meeting, told the principal to get a sub, and drove off. One of the biggest issues has been a sharp spike in unnecessary meetings as consultants work to justify their contract. We meet to discuss data, testing, plan units, or do everyone's favorite team building activities.

However, things are finally looking up because every teacher knows that we're nearing the most wonderful time of the year. Christmas break will get to glorious weeks of not being harassed by students or administrators. Inter Karen. We received an email at the end of last week from Karen telling us that we needed to have a meeting over Christmas break to plan unit 4. She told us that we could pick the day and time and then send her the Zoom link and she would join to lead it. Needless to say, the department was very unhappy. We had already planned the unit anyway, but Karen said that she needed to be involved

in any planning and insisted the meeting was necessary. Finally, the department had had enough. She planned the meeting as instructed and sent us all the link for the Zoom session. The meeting was planned for 11 p.m. on December 24th. We all instantly accepted the meeting time and confirmed that we would attend. For some reason, Karen wasn't happy with the meeting time. She pushed back, complained to an assistant principal, who backed us up, and tried to get us to change the time, but she got the same answer back from everyone. You told them to schedule a meeting, so either attend or cancel. She canceled. That was our Slosh Militius Compliance, and if you liked this content, be sure to follow

my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. That was our Slash Militious Compliance, and if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast, because I put out new Reddit podcasts every day.